The four protagonists in Matthew Baker's collection Hybrid Creatures are preoccupied with the idea of connection-how to connect with strangers, how to connect with family, how to connect with friends, and what makes a connection sincere. A young hacker attempts to track down his vanished mentor; a boy is equally torn between his mother's and father's families; a composer takes a spontaneous trip to Nashville in the wake of his husband's death and gets stuck on a roof with a hipster philosopher; and an elderly businessman searches for his wife at a dinner party on a remote mountain. Each story in the collection is written partially in a hybrid language: HTML; mathematics; musical notation; and formal logic, the language used to construct philosophical arguments. These hybrid lexicons attempt to capture the consciousness of someone whose experience of the world is filtered through linguistic fusion--and because there are aspects of the human experience, certain connections the characters make, that are only possible to communicate through these hybrid tongues. In the end, Hybrid Creatures is a moving exploration of how hard yet necessary it is to connect with others and even one's self, as well as the various languages we use in an attempt to do so.
"No one writes quite like Matthew Baker, and Hybrid Creatures is an astonishingly unique collection. Through the language of coding, mathematics, and musical notation, the characters in these stories analyze their worlds through ordered systems of logic that attempt to make sense of the inexplicability of grief and loss. This is a beautiful book from an observant and talented writer."
Anne Valente
"In Hybrid Creatures, a character asserts that 'there were no superior or inferior forms,' but these are fantastic, fearless stories that I could not imagine until Baker, with such care and control, led me toward something altogether a superior form. An amazing discovery."
Kevin Wilson
"Hybrid Creatures is a deep dive into some of the most fascinating character-minds in fiction. A hacker, a mathematically gifted child, a composer, and a philosopher each process the world through their field's systems of notation. And yet feeling rules every page. Emotionally intimate, bursting with longing and humor, these stories disarm, delight, and surprise."
